The best known books set in each country: Benin

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Benin.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Viceroy of Ouidah	Bruce Chatwin	1,409	768
It Takes a Village	Jane Cowen-Fletcher	153	948
Instruments of Darkness	Robert Wilson	490	257
A Darkening Stain	Robert Wilson	275	112
Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey	Stanley B. Alpern	123	69
The Dahomean	Frank Yerby	109	55
Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music	Angelique Kidjo	156	21
The Hand of Iman	Ryad Assani-Razaki	119	15

This week’s winner, The Viceroy of Ouidah, is a 1980 novel about a European slave trader who builds a life for himself in West Africa; it was filmed by Werner Herzog as Cobra Verde, starring Klaus Kinski.

This week’s LibraryThing winner, It Takes a Village, has been overshadowed by the book of the same title published two years later by Hillary Clinton. It is a 1994 children’s book about living in a village in Benin and being looked after by the neighbours.

Of the listed authors, Angelique Kidjo is from Benin; I am not quite sure how much of her autobiography is set there, but I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt. Ryad Assani-Razaki is also from Benin, and my sources seem to agree that The Hand of Iman (original French title just Iman) is set there.

I disqualified a lot of books. Some are about the Benin Bronzes, which however originated in the historical Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria.

There are also a lot of books about slavery with the ‘benin’ tag in both systems; these however tend to concentrate on the protagonists’ lives after they left West Africa. It’s not at all certain that Olaudah Equiano, the most celebrated example, was even from what’s now Benin (though personally I’m pretty sure he was from West Africa). It seems more likely for Cudjoe Lewis / Oluale Kossola.

The protagonist of the Bruce Medway thrillers by Robert Wilson lives in Benin. I was sufficiently sure of Instruments of Darkness and A Darkening Stain to list them above; I wasn’t quite so sure of the third novel in the series, Blood is Dirt.

Coming next: Rwanda, Burundi, a step away from Africa to Bolivia and a step back again to Tunisia.

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The best known books set in each country: Benin

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